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Posts Tagged ‘custom framework’

Our game, Ultra Hat Dimension, is a puzzle game in which you are a hat designer. You won a prestigious hat design contest on another world, but at the ball in your honor everyone suddenly went crazy, aligned themselves into factions based on which of your hats they’re wearing, and started attacking each other and you. So your goal is to get out of the palace. To do so, you have to get past the crazed guests, using hats to avoid getting punched backwards and to move people so they’ll get out of your way and/or attack each other.

This was my first team effort, done with Woof (@woofycakes), Yuzuki (@yuzukimasu), and Eniko (@enichan). Woof was on art, Yuzuki on music, Eniko on programming, and I did the writing, level designs, and mouth sounds. As someone who always found group work incredibly frustrating in school, I was pleasantly surprised by how awesome it was to focus on one area and let the others take care of their areas so we could end up with a game which has been very well received.

This is a long postmortem, so read on after the break to learn more about how we made it!

Like others before me, this article is, without surprise, be an introduction to the fact that I’ll also take part in LD23. This is my first Ludum Dare, so I’ll do my best.

My goal is to finish something, and this is definitely not something that you can be sure of in advance. Especially since I’m gonna code my game in HTML5/Javascript, the latter being almost new to me. As like most people, I have never had to write more than a few lines in this language. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot this weekend, which is also a very good motivation to me.

I’m not afraid of the technical challenge, as during the warmup period I’ve writen a small bootstrapping library. It will hopefully allow me to focus on the game creation rather than on the technical details. I say “hopefully” as this small library is my first attempt at writing some JS, I did not have time to put eveything I wanted in it, it has not been tested the way I wanted, and I’m also still not used to the syntax of the language. Anyway, it should be of a great help. That’s by far not the best piece of software I’ve writen, but if you feel like using it, it is avalaible on Github. It features:
– A game structure
– A ressource cache for images -> loading screen
– Small management of effects (example is shown with fade-in/fade-out)
– Sprite animations (really really basic)
– Easy keyboard management
– Viewport. Well, sort of
– Easy drawing/writing with the screen class
– A Timer class for dealing with time management

This will be the first time I’m gonna use the library for a real application so it’ll probably evolve during the weekend.

As for my other tools:
– Notepad++/Chrome. I love this notepad, and Chrome’s debugger for javascript is quite nice.
– Git. Source control is really useful, even on small project. It can really be a lifesaver if you break something by “accident” and can’t get back to something that worked by yourself. If you don’t know how to use such kind of tools, that’s a great opportunity to do that, you won’t regret it.
– Paint.Net: There is no enough time for me to do some good job with tools like Gimp or Inkscape, so let’s focus on what I know. It won’t be pretty, but art has never been a strength for me.
– sfxr: That’s the same for music. Let’s hope it’s gonna make something good, I have no idea how to do something better (and, I’ll most likely won’t have enough time to learn). I tried Bfxr and I prefer the results with this one.
– Chronolapse: If the video is not too boring, I might publish a timelapse of my work.
– Winamp and some junk food.